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Toshiba has introduced a product sure to find their way into iPods and other portable media players: 1.8-inch hard disks offering 100 GB of storage capacity.

It was only a few years ago that hard drives offering 100 GB of storage capacity were rare, expensive, and seemingly pointless. (Really: what did the average computer user do that could require 100 GB of storage?) These days, however hard drives with capacities much greater than 100 GB are commonplace, and now drive maker Toshiba has announced (PDF) it has created tiny 1.8-inch hard drives with 100 GB capacities. What sorts of devices would want a 1.8-inch hard drive with that much storage? Why, camcorders, PDAs, portable computers, and, of course, media players. Like the iPod.

Toshiba's new MK1011GAH 100 GB 1.8-inch hard disks are based on the perpendicular recording technology (where individual bits are essentially stacked in a narrow "upright" manner as opposed to laid lengthwise end-to-end) and use a two-platter/four-head design with an 8 MB cache. The drives can transfer data at 100MB/s, spin at 4,200 rpm, and sport an average seek time of 15 ms.

According to IDC, Toshiba dominates the market for 1.8-inch hard disks used in portable devices, commanding some 80 percent of the market; the company has shipped over 40 million 1.8-inch drives since the form factor's introduction in 2000.